Hi everyone.

Over the past weekend, we shipped major new beta builds for, well, just about every single one of our products.

On the Elements front (Oxygene and RemObjects C#) we’ve also shipped the first beta for the May 2014 update, which will be a minor bug-fix update, but has a lot of significant improvements nonetheless. Check out the change log for details. (Of course, before that, the April update with version 7.1 is imminent and has been in gamma and locked down for a while; we expect that to ship as RTM this week.)

For our ROFX products, including Data Abstract and RemObjects SDK, I know that many of you are looking forward to the major new “DA8” (and RO8) release. Well, last week’s beta is the first publicly available beta off that development branch, and will give you a first peek at what’s coming in DA8. It’s far from feature complete, but there’s a lot of new and exciting stuff already there, from new features to support hosting Relativity in AWS, over better asynchronous APIs for Delphi and .NET (all the other, newer platforms already had pretty nice async APIs to begin with), to our all-new and very extensive PCTrade2 sample suite. From improved DA SQL client support in DA/Delphi, over Amazon DynamoDB Session Manager support, to our new Login Provider infrastructure. But there’s still more to come.

As part of the new DA8, we’ve also been doing a lot of “spring cleaning”, bringing the codebase (especially for the older and more mature products for Delphi and .NET) up wit the times, and removing some old cruft that as accumulated over the years as the frameworks evolved. Please refer to the change logs (available on beta.remobjects.com and in the Beta app), as well as the ROFX Beta forum on Talk for details.

Oh, I should mention that this beta also includes support for the just-released Delphi XE6, and the same goes for the new Hydra 4 gamma build that is available, as well.

We’ll be publishing more regular semi-weekly beta updates for ROFX (much like we always do for Elements) as we prepare for the first “DA8” release to launch officially in May.

We’re very excited about this next release, and the team has been very busy. We hope you’ll like what you’ll see — and please let us know in the comments, in the beta forum, or via email to info@.